War horses – lifeline of an army

Associated media

Amy Sargeant explores ‘War Horse: Fact and Fiction’ at the National Army Museum, Chelsea, London

This exhibition is prompted by the enormous success of Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 novel, War Horse, and its subsequent adaptation to stage and screen. As a character in the story says when the farm boy, Albert, is reunited with the narrator of the story, the horse, Joey: ‘No horse, no guns. No horse, no ammunition. No horse, no cavalry. No horse, no ambulances. No horse, no water for the troops at the front. Lifeline of the whole army’.

The exhibition includes costumes and props (including Captain Nicholls’ sketchbook) from Steven Spielberg’s 2011 film and accounts from contributors to the 2004 National Theatre staging (the NT itself is showing designs, models and puppets from June to September), alongside the watercolours of horses at the front, which, by ‘happy accident’, inspired Morpurgo in the first place.

Various exhibits (objects both utilitarian and decorative; written accounts; drawings; photographs and film), chart the care and transport of horses (including veterinary tools and Siegfried Sassoon’s notebooks); the purchase and sale of horses; the training of horses and their riders throughout the Empire by way of sports; and the use of horses, mules and donkeys in a number of specific battles and campaigns. These include the Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava in 1854, which is documented alongside the better-known fate of the Light Brigade (mythologized in painting and in verse).

It seems extraordinary that, despite the introduction of tanks, as late as 1917 the Canadian Cavalry was still in operation in Palestine: ‘the key to the charge was the impact caused when a fast-moving object hit a slow or stationary object’. The fictional pairing of Albert and Joey is matched by the historic coupling of, for instance, Napoleon and Morengo and of Wellington with Copenhagen, a horse characteristically praised by the old warrior for ‘bottom and endurance’ rather than its looks. There are happy endings to some of these stories (war horses reunited with their riders after years of separation; animals saved from a life of misery or the knackers by the intervention of the Blue Cross fund; a mule adopted as a regimental mascot and honoured for its bravery). The less fortunate (those not stranded, killed in battle or so badly injured it seemed most kind to shoot them on the spot) simply got left behind. The affection between man and horse is commemorated through souvenirs, relics, trophies and sentimental postcards depicting ‘Pals’ and ‘Comrades’. Historically, material spans from the English Civil War to the duties of the current Household Cavalry.

I admit that I had never visited the Army Museum before seeing this temporary exhibition. I was struck by the contemporaneity of the show’s style of presentation as much as its content. A colouring-in corner – the ‘Remembrance Wall’ – is the least of its flags and whistles. First World War footage is projected onto life-size white horses at the gallop, there are sound effects of battle, listening posts at which one can hear extracts from oral histories, games, uniforms to try on and pummelled saddles to sit on, a collapsed wire horse and a cabinet which places Topthorn and Joey in a battalion of stencil-cut horses. If the visitor ventures to the upper galleries to find the skeleton of Morengo, another, more sedate style of narrative and display is encountered: immaculately modelled and costumed figures, maps, samples of weaponry and so forth. This exhibition not only records the significance of its subject but also marks shifts in the display of material culture as education and entertainment, the uses to which museum collections are applied, and the interaction of museums with other visitor attractions. It speaks as much for the history of museology as for the history of the horse, in war.

With Stephen Fry, on BBC Radio 4, reading from the ‘correspondence’ of Morengo and Copenhagen, and the British Museum’s summer exhibition and associated events, 2012 is shaping-up to be a Year of the Horse – rather than, as the Chinese would have it, the Rabbit.